With the start of the new school year, I had to report Leo Babauta’s guide to a different form of learning—“Unschooling.” With all the many different ideas floating around these days about education, this is probably the most “out there.” But, I don’t mean that in a “this is so crazy that no one should try it” kind of way; rather, it really is pushing “out there” beyond the norm. He’s not alone as previous articles in Wired have promoted various other thinkers who are suggesting that the entire academic system be abandoned. In any case, Leo’s got some interesting things as well as some links that could be useful.
It’s an educational philosophy that provides for more freedom than any other learning method, and prepares kids for an uncertain and rapidly changing future better than anything else I know. My wife and I unschool four of our kids, and have been for several years.
And yet, as powerful as I believe unschooling to be, I’ve never written about it, because the truth is, I certainly don’t have all the answers. No one does.
The beauty of unschooling is in the search for the answers. If anyone had all the answers, there would be no search. And so what I’d love to teach unschooling parents and kids is that the search is the joy of it all.
Pretty Intriquing, huh? Need more? Well, here’s a bullet list of ideas he presents:
This is how I describe it — in contrast to school:
- While school has classes with subjects, unschooling doesn’t.
- While school has goals set by teachers and the school system, the unschooler (the kid) set his or her own goals.
- While in school, knowledge is handed down from the teacher to the student, in unschooling the student is empowered to learn for himself.
- While school has specific books or sets of learning materials, unschoolers can learn from anything — books they find, things on the Internet, siblings or parents, the outdoors, museums, people working in interesting fields, anything.
- While school is structured, unschooling is like jazz. It’s done on the fly, changing as the student changes.
- While students in school learn to follow instructions, unschoolers learn to think for themselves and make their own decisions.
- While students in school are asked to learn at pace arbitrarily set by administrators, unschoolers learn at their own pace.
- While in school, learning happens in the classroom at certain times, in unschooling learning happens all the time, and there is no division between learning and life.
If it intrigues (or worries) you, make sure you read his full article.